Muang Sing-ing in the rain

I've discovered why they call it the rainy season right now - its always flippin' pouring. Go figure.

I'm in a tiny town called Luang Namtha in far northwestern Laos. I arrived here on Tuesday after yet another rigorous 10 hour bus ride from Luang Prabang. I'm getting good at those now. I met up with a nice bunch of British couples and we planned to do some trekking through the surrounding forests and hill tribe villages together. No tours were going out on Wednesday so we all hired mountain bikes and explored the surrounding areas, we even had some sunshine that day.

Rice paddies in the Luang Namtha area.

Another shot over the rice fields. Spot the local version of the tractor.

Later on Wednesday when we went to book onto a 2 day trek for the next day we heard that a gunman was ranging in the forests, had killed a villager, and had fired upon some tourists. Trekking didn't seem like such a good idea anymore. I only need to be in Houay Xai tomorrow afternoon so still had 2 days to kill. One other couple, Paul and Yvonne, were in the same boat so whilst the others moved on, the 3 of us hired motorbikes yesterday and headed out to the town of Muang Sing, about 70km away, for a night. The ride out there was really great. I'm growing very fond of motorbikes as you don't feel like you're looking at the world through the picture frame of a window.

"Resplendent" is the only word for it, and the buffalo looks good too... Hey now Lao cow.

Muang Sing is the historical centre of the infamous Golden Triangle of Opium growing and trade. Today there is not a whole lot there. Boo. But its situation right near the borders with Burma (Myanmar) and China, together with the large numbers of hill tribe people in town to trade, made it an interesting side trip. We even found a great lodge about 6km outside of town with awesome views over the rice paddies and drank a few beers and bottles of wine. This after Paul and I were forcefully evicted from our attempts to fish in a nearby dam by an irate, machete wielding, Lao farmer.

Some ladies from the local Akha tribe try to sell some trinkets to Yvonne in Muang Sing.

The view from our the little lodge we stayed in last night over towards the Burmese border.

As I mentioned, tomorrow I head south to Houay Xai, on the border with Thailand, to join the Gibbon Experience. This looks like it will be an awesome couple of days spent zip lining through the forests from one tree house to the next. Watch this space for reviews. I'm hoping the dirt road from Luang Namtha to Houay Xai will dry out a bit over night so I can get there in a day. I also hope to get out from the forest in time for my trip back to Bangkok and subsequent flight to Borneo. The trip is supposed to have me back in Houay Xai on the afternoon of the 31st so I booked a flight to Bangkok from Chiang Rai in Thailand for the afternoon of the 1st of August. But now I'm told the roads are all submerged so I may not get out of the forest in time. Oh well, its all an adventure! Here goes nothing!

A map showing the route I follow tomorrow down to Houay Xai and then up to the tree houses at GibbonX.

Lovely Luang Prabang

This must rate as one of the most beautiful towns in the world. Its right up there with Antigua in Guatemala in my book, but also with a little something extra.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Luang Prabang is a world heritage site, meaning the old buildings are protected and the lovely small streets are still lined with the original old French style buildings. Scattered around town are also numerous beautiful Buddhist Wats, or temples. These Wats are all still in use and bright orange robed monks wander the streets by the hundred. Right now I can here the bells ringing from on of the temples across the street.

And this wonderful little town is also set in a spectacular location right on the banks of the mighty Mekong river, surrounded by dark green hills. There are some supposedly beautiful waterfalls and caves in the surrounding areas too. I have to say supposedly since I haven't had the chance to see them. I'd set aside today for that part of my explorations but have been knocked-out with food poisoning. Yip, I finally succumbed to the temptations of all the wonderful French restaurants in town, and obviously chose the wrong one (I thoroughly enjoyed my steak the first time around but our subsequent encounters have been less so...). Its a pity not to have been able to enjoy myself here to the full but I'll still leave the place with fond memories.

A view over Luang Prabang and the Mekong river just before sunset.

A street in Luang Prabang, with a gilded temple on the hill overlooking a street complete with French architecture and an ubiquitous tuk-tuk.

Some young monks wander the streets. I wish I could take better photos of them but its seen as pretty rude. Early tomorrow morning I plan to watch them receiving alms from the locals outside the Wats.

Tomorrow I get on yet another all day bus. This time its to a town called Luang Namtha in the far northwest, near the border with Myanmar. Its way off the beaten track but there is supposed to be some good trekking in the nearby national park, and this is appealingly different to the usual trekking people doing in northern Thailand. I must confess that I need to do the trekking in order to get prepared for my fast approaching climb of Mt Kinabalu in Borneo with Russell.

From Luang Namtha I have to get down to the border with Thailand at Houyxai, where I join my Gibbon Experience trip. Its all going to be a bit of a rush over the next week so I hope it all fits together.

A jarring experience

I've just arrived in Luang Prabang in northern Laos. This city is a UNESCO World Heritage site so is supposed to be gorgeous. I haven't had a chance to explore yet as, surprise surprise, its pissing with rain again...

I left Vang Vieng on Thursday morning for the highland town of Phonsavanh. The bus ride was yet another nightmare. I hate winding roads at the best of times, but crammed into a crappy bus on those roads for over 6 hours really sucked! But in the end it was worth it. I found a very cool guesthouse, very run down, but hosted by the hilarious Mr Kong, and I joined the guesthouse tour of the Plain of Jars sites on Friday. No-one knows why these massive jars were built, and there are hundreds of them scattered around the Phonsavan area. Only a few sites are open to the public as there is a lot of UXO (unexploded ordinance) about in that part of Laos, but I'll get to that in a moment.

Some of the bigger jars at Site 1. Some say these were made as funeral urns, others think they were big vats for making Laos whisky (Lao Lao) to celebrate a great victory.

Some more jars at Site 3. To get to these sites one has to religiously follow the paths staked out by the mine sweeping teams.

Mr Kong demonstrates how to drink Laos wine through a bamboo straw. I won a nights' drinking from him in a game of golf around the guesthouse grounds. I should have thrown the game - my head still hurts!

Seeing the jars was very interesting, but as always I found the contemporary history more interesting. The eastern highlands of Laos were bombed on a massive scale in the 70s by the Americans in what was termed the "Secret War", as no-one knew it was going on. A lot of the bombing was validated as attempts to halt the flow of Vietcong arms from northern Vietnam into the south on the infamous Ho Chi Minh trail. But that trail only entered Laos much further south. The Phonsavan area was bombed as part of a campaign against the Laos communists, or Pathet Laos, in contravention of the Geneva accord which banned intervention in Laos. Apparently US bombers were told they were bombing sites in Vietnam.

During this campaign a massive 2 million tons of bombs were dropped on Laos. That's more than the US dropped in all spheres of WW2 put together! That's also 2 tons of bombs for every person living in that part of Laos! The most used type of ordinance was the infamous cluster bomb. This bomb contains hundreds of smaller bombs that each contain thousands of ball bearings, thus designed to kill people not tanks etc. The problem today is that millions of these small bombs, called "Bombies" by the locals, are still scattered throughout the area. They're about the size of a tennis ball and kill hundreds of people every year when they're hit by people working in the fields or when children find them and play with them, unwittingly arming them.

Some old bombs I saw lying around in a scrapyard in Phonsavanh town.

It was thus mildly amusing to hear some American tourists in a coffee shop a while ago complaining that people here are so unfriendly to them when they find out they're Americans...

I plan to stay in LP for a couple of days to explore all the temples, surrounding waterfalls, and wonderful old French restaurants. I'll then head even further north to see some more remote places, then across towards Myanmar for some trekking, then I've booked 2 days on the Gibbon Experience (treehouses in the jungles to live with the gibbons) before crossing to Thailand.

Some friendly Loas ladies convince me to buy the local version of litchis in the Phonsavanh town market.

Tubing, Friends re-runs, and way too much lao lao!

This is one strange town. Vang Vieng is now firmly on the backpacker map and its pretty hard to figure out how the hell the place ended up like this!

The town is set very picturesquely on the banks of a river surrounded by beautiful limestone cliffs, and is well placed about halfway between Vientiane, the capital, and Luang Phabang, the most popular tourist destination in Laos. But that hardly seems the reason why the place is packed with young travellers. The reason seems firmly centered around the tubing phenomenon. You can hire a tube here for a day and float down river stopping off at one little bamboo pub after the next. Each bar serves cheap beer and free lao lao (the local rice spirit) shots, and also all have an array of zip lines and crazily high swings over the river. I would love to add some photos from the 3 days of tubing I've done here but I haven't been mad enough to even contemplate taking a camera along!

Another really strange phenomenon is the Friends bars. Every second restaurant/bar in this town shows 24/7 re-runs of Friends episodes. Don't get me wrong, I love watching Friends, but its still really strange!

Tomorrow I'm heading northeast to Phonsavan in order to see the Plain of Jars, and to try to get away from the masses of British students on summer holidays. They've been fun but enough is enough...

I promise to add photos in my next post.

Valiant on Valium

I'm stuck for a few hours in a town called Pakxe in southern Laos before I bus tonight to Vientiane, the capital. I'm sick of crappy bus journeys so I've taken advantage of being able to buy over the counter Valium here and will hopefully be out like a light for the journey. Sorry mum, but there's only so many fat ladies and chickens you can endure on your lap...

The trip up here was actually way less eventful than I expected. Getting across Cambodia from Siem Reap to the border involved a number of long journeys; one being in the back of a rusty minibus, with no seats, piled high with fish traps, on the seriously muddy backroads between Kampong Cham and Kratie. In Kratie, however, I found a small tour agency that offered combined tickets to the border and across to the 4000 islands area in Laos. That saved a massive amount of hassle, and at least 2 days of travel time. That means I'm now ahead of my little schedule for this leg, but by the sounds of things I may be stuck in some other areas in Laos for longer than planned as they sound like a really good jol.

I spent 2 nights on the little island of Don Det in the 4000 islands area. This very southerly part of Laos is where the massive Mekong river splits into a web of smaller channels, not unlike the Okavango Delta in appearance. It was very beautiful and all but a little too chilled for my liking... not a whole lot of conversation going on when all and sundry are stoned out of their skulls!

Rice paddies on Don Det. Its not a great shot but I want to show just how green they are here.

A local on Don Det brushes his teeth in the Mekong below my balcony.

Zoom zoom zoom

Sunset over the Mekong River. I may just have a had a cheeky beer while watching it...

From Vientiane I plan to head straight on to Vian Vieng, famed for its riotous tubing trips. From there I think I'll head to Luang Phabang, with a possible stop to see the famous Plain of Jars.

Angkor revisited. And they still won't let me add any more cheesy titles...

I have found a marginally better internet connection so am trying to upload a few more photos from Angkor. Its running at about one upload every half hour so it won't be very many. Sorry.

Today was awesome. I hired a bicycle for a whopping $1 a day and headed out as early as my severe oversleeping allowed. There were a few temples I wanted to see and didn't get to yesterday, but also some that needed revisiting at a more sedate pace. My favourite today was definitely Ta Prohm, a temple that has been left in the state it would have been in when Angkor was rediscovered in the 19th century. Huge trees have grown all over the moss covered stones making it very atmospheric. Its also the site where Tomb Raider was filmed. Besides that, today was really cool in that it gave me a better chance to appreciate the scale of the place. And to see a little more of rural Cambodian life.

Tomb raiding in Ta Prohm.

The funky Bayon temple in Angkor Thom with some of its 216 huge faces of Avalokiteshvara (whoever that is!)

Young monks take painting lessons at the Bayon.

A shot from the east side of Angkor Wat.

After a day of riding around in the sun I was pretty exhausted so headed back to Siem Reap in the late afternoon. I then found the coolest massage place ever! Seeing Hands is a project that trains blind Cambodians in the arts of Thai and Japanese massage. This gives them employment and a way to support themselves, a gives me a very nice way to recover. Oh, and a whole hour costs $4 (R28)...

Tomorrow morning sees the start of my mission to the north. And chatting to some people it seems I won't be too far out of touch. Sorry, but you might be hearing from me again sooner than you hoped...

Angkor What?

For some random reason Blogger isn't allowing me to add a title to this post - maybe they've read my previous attempts and voted to block me! But anyway, moving on...

Timmy is Tomb Raider (without the boobs).

I'm now in Siem Reap in northwest Cambodia, home to the famous temples of Angkor. I did go down to Sihanoukville on Friday but the weather was worse than disgusting, beaches in monsoon season don't work, so lets just skip that part. I headed back to Phnom Penh on Sunday morning and managed to get straight on another bus out here.

This morning I headed out just before 5am to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat. The overcast weather dismissed any chances of a spectacular sunrise, but the temples more than made up for that. They are amazing. Angkor Wat is the biggest and most famous, supposedly the biggest religious site in the world, but its not the only attraction. Angkor Thom is another whole ancient city nearby, at its height it was home to a million people (at the time London only had 50,000!) And other awesome temples are also scattered elsewhere throughout the area, some 50km or more away. The stone carvings in some of them are spectacular.

Angkor Wat a moment before sunrise.

Today I went flat out from before sunrise to after sunset and I've still hardly made a dent. I'm not going to even try. Tomorrow I'll hire a bicycle and do things at a more sedate pace. I'll try to add some more photos after that if this connection speeds up.

In case I don't get back on to the internet soon I thought I might add my plans for the next leg. On Wednesday I head back east as far as Kampong Cham, from there I'm aiming to head north via Kratie and Stung Treng to the Laos border. Its an unofficial border crossing so who knows what'll happen. I'm also not even sure if there's any transport available on that side. So if you don't hear from me for a while I'm stuck somewhere in southern Laos. Get a map.

Phnom 'n all

Sometimes when I look back at these blog titles I realise I probably drink way too much... But, yes, Timmy is in Phnom Penh in Cambodia. And it is phenomenal.

I last wrote from Mui Ne in Vietnam. From there I travelled to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City has never really stuck) but only spent two nights there. Just enough time to get a taste of that crazy city, and to see the famed Cu Chi tunnels used by the Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. Although I had a really good time in Vietnam, I'm not completely enamoured with the place. Maybe its that shape of the country that makes it feel like a tourist conveyor belt. That combined with the excessive number of American tourists.

I can't put my finger on why, but Cambodia immediately feels better. The people just seem friendlier. I've only been here 2 days but I already feel like I'm going to enjoy my time here. But thats not to say today has been fun by any stretch of the imagination. I have had the most heart wrenching day in my life. The things that happened in this country are too appalling to think about.

I shrugged off yet another hangover this morning and made my way to the S-21 genocide museum. This former high school was used as a detention and torture centre during the rule of the Khymer Rouge between 1975 and 1978. During that time 20,000 people were held there. 7 survived. I sobered up quickly.

The Khymer Rouge, under Pol Pot, instituted a fast tracked and brutal Communist regime that saw the entire population of Phnom Penh relocated to rural villages to work on communal farms. No two family members were kept together. Even young children were split from their families. All intellectuals (doctors, teachers etc.) were executed. During the 3 and a half years under Pol Pot 2 million people died. And this is a small country.

The S-21 museum really grabbed me through the photos and testimonials of the prisoners and the handful of survivors. The things that people are capable of doing to each other are beyond conception. But that was only the start. After the museum I headed out to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek. This is where people from all over the region, including S-21, were brought to be executed. A metal bar was used to smash in the back of the neck, the people weren't even worth a bullet. The memorial at Choeung Ek contains all the skulls of the victims found in the mass unmarked graves. To see the skulls of the people I'd seen in the photos half an hour before absolutely gutted me.

The faces of some of the victims of S-21.


A snippet from one of the many stories behind S-21.

I can't say anything here.

Sadly, one of the stops popular with tourists is at one of the shooting ranges. Here you can pay to fire off an AK47 or M16, or even blow up some chickens with a grenade. But to even contemplate firing guns after what I'd seen wasn't possible. I wonder if people stop to think that the gun they're firing wasn't made to shoot at paper targets. It was built to shoot people. Living, breathing, loving, people.

On to happier things though. I had lunch today at a restaurant called Friends and I think I've found the sort of project I'd really like to get involved in some day soon back in South Africa. This gorgeous little Tapas restaurant trains street children in the restaurant, as chefs and in other service fields, before they go off to work in hotels and restaurants around the country. It looks like such a nice way to make a difference. And the food was great too.

Getting smiles back at Friends. Just one of the lovely spots in what is a very friendly, beautiful city today.

Tomorrow I head to the coast at Sihanoukville. I hope the weather improves so I can hit the beach.

Dis Mui ne?

After leaving Da Lat early yesterday morning I now find myself in the little seaside town of Mui Ne which is about 4 hours east of Saigon. Larisa also decided to head down here and we joined up with two Californians, Carmela and Anna. We're all staying in simple bamboo cottages right on the beach. Sounds idyllic except that the weather isn't really playing along. Its pouring with rain right now and has been overcast all the time, except for about an hour last night, but I'll get to that...

Mui Ne is well known for its kite and wind-surfing as it has pretty constant onshore winds. The beach is also about 20km long so there's plenty of space too. The surrounding area also has lots to see. Today we all hired motorbikes and headed out along the coastal road to see the impressive white sand dunes, red canyons yellow dunes and fairy stream. See pictures for details.

Last night, in the only moment of clear skies, revealed one of the more beautiful sights I've ever seen. The full moon somehow combined with the bioluminescent plankton in the water to turn the breaking waves a shimmering gold. It might sound cheesy but it was truly spectacular - an ocean of molten gold. Amazing.

Carmela and Anna get lost amongst the white dunes about 25km outside Mui Ne.

Buggering around at Red Canyons.

Not quite Harleys, but I try to look cool anyway...

A stroll up Fairy stream. Bad name, but a lovely way to wander.

A petrol station. Seriously. One dollar for a wine bottle full...